sehnsucht
by januarylightsphere
Summary: press your lips to my scarred skin - america, vietnam, nyotalia.


**Sehnsucht - German** : a certain form of heavy longing, yearning and craving - a type of intensely missing something/someone.

 **disclaimer:** because as the writer, i need to torment those lovelies.

 **notes:** i just want to write sad and bitter girl. and it's valentine so i'd be damned if i don't write anything for my otp. and it's valentine day so i will not write angst. To be honest my angst radar has turned into the pokemon fandom direction but who knows.

so as usual, it's nyotalia verse and i know they aren't so in characters. i don't think i need to make a namelist in this one because they don't appear. not like that other story of mine. but of course feel free to ask if you don't know who is who i will answer.

St Petersburg is so cold in winter, such a beautiful city though.

please enjoy your reading.

* * *

 _Just close your eyes_  
 _The sun is going down_  
 _You'll be alright_  
 _No one can hurt you now_  
 _Come morning light_  
 _You and I'll be safe and sound_

 _\- Safe and Sound, Taylor Swift._

* * *

 _Rain kept pouring today, and it put me into an uncomfortable mood, you know how much I dislike the rain. I thought it would never stop. And then it did, and the sun appears, and the ray of sunshine lingered in the rooftops reminded me of you. You and your laughter and the way you always ruffled my hair when I'd said something you thought was so clever - and in all honestly, you know I am. I was so clever that I didn't even to think a second time to reach this decision. But still, I'm not the girl you made up in your head._

xxx

He finds the note wedged between her roses and his cactus on the window ledge in living room. The realization that she has broken in again frustrates him to no end but only because it is startled to know she has been in his house without waking him, not because he's sick of doing it. In all honesty, he's too used to her breaking in to even care about it.

He makes coffee before he reads the note. When he has a cup steaming and warm between his hands, he finally plucks the note from where she's placed it and sits down on the sofa to unfurl it. It curls at the edges so it takes him to a few seconds to flat it out, and finds a familiar surge of heat when the paper resists his efforts. Clearly, she must make a paper have her personality. So in the end he just holds it with his forefingers and scans the words eagerly, a drowning man gulping at the last air in his tanks.

When he finishes reading it and reads it twice more and tries not to think about how much she makes his heart ache. Instead he throws the ragged piece of paper into the air, and it lands perfectly in one box. He reminds her of the sun, he notes absent-mindedly, and he wonders why, though he has the feeling that the answer has already been written in his heart.

He hates Amelia, most days. He hates her because he wishes he didn't love her and because every time he almost gets over her she does something like this. Something that means he can never forget her and it makes him curse her, that cunning and sly girl.

Before he goes to work, Quan takes a look at the box where the note is resting now, it's now among many many notes she's sent him over the last five years of running and hiding. Too many notes, he thinks, too many notes and not enough explanations. She leaves him truths and whim and dreams - and he stores them like this, so desperately and so pathetically, like maybe on the box is full she will come back to him.

xxx

 _Quan, I've found some new favorite songs. You know what kind of songs? Songs that turn into sickness, songs that you can't shake and can't recover from. All you can do is to listen to them, over and over and over again, until the lyrics burn into your bones and your flesh. I wish I could come to you so we could listen to them together, but then I remember you never like sad songs - aren't I considerate? But it doesn't stop me wishing. If we were bounded by this song, maybe I'd bound to you._

xxx

The next note comes a month later, slipped into his desk at work. He has changed his job six times since she ran away, so famous for being unable to settle to anything, but she always manages to find him. He used to worry that she wouldn't be able to, but then a note turned up among the achillea and asphodel. He remembers thinking _of course_ she chose those flowers. 'State of war' and 'my regret will follow you to the grave' is what they are nowadays, right? Amelia always love symbolism - and who is Quan if he doesn't understand her?

He reads the note before putting into his pocket to place into the box when he gets home later. She's left a lipstick kiss on the bottom of this one, and when he presses his nose to it and closes his eyes, he can almost picture her, amber hair, pink lips, slender finger dragging a cigarette and expensive French perfume she's received from Marianne since her seventh birthday, much to Alice's dismay. Quan thinks he knows that smell better than any other.

The guy at the desk opposite to him gives him a slightly odd look when he finally gets back to work, but Quan just frowns in return and the man returns to his own business without saying another word. This guy was friendly when Quan first arrived, all smile and bright eyes that certainly reminded him a bit of his brother. But Quan's silence and moodiness and inability to make human connections soon encourage the guy to give up, and these days they barely nod to each other as basic greetings. And Quan used to think that maybe Chun Yan would be reprimand him later, but currently it is not within his interest to care.

(he misses being open to his family so much that most days, he blames Amelia for this.)

So he sits at his desk for the rest of the day, feeling kind of lonely and kind of sad and watches the rain trickle down the leaves and wonders if there's any point to anything anymore.

xxx

 _Do you know how much I want to forget you, darling? I wish I could forget you, entirely. I remember Sorina - or is it Aina? - told me about some ancient spell that could delete memory and replace with one another. Of course it's myth, but I couldn't help but think what if I could actually forget you? Maybe I wouldn't get twisty inside when I thought of you. But I do, I do and I dislike it. I dream about you almost every night and my fragmented nightmares are about with with some girls, faceless and white. I loathe those girls and I loathe myself. I don't know what to do about it. Do you know, darling?_

xxx

When he finds the latest note trapped between the envelopes of bills, Quan loses his temper for the first time in a very long time. He only comes back to himself and Chun Yan voices her concern downstairs, and he sits down on the chair in the centre of his shattering room and gives up. He packs his bag in half an hour and leaves. If Amelia can do it, why can't he?

He doesn't show his surprise when Chun Yan actually allows him too - if she were persistent, he might lose this determination, because she's his sister and he's vowed before their parents' grave to take care of her until his last breath. Chun Yan tells him the name of the first place she thinks of, and Quan thinks it's perfectly suitable.

That's why he comes to Russia. It barely takes any efforts, just booking a plane ticket to St Petersburg and a phone call to Anya, who can easily buy him a flat and make very clear that he will have to pay her later. Quan decides if he comes to the city that Amelia hates, he can move on from her and the way she haunts his every step. He opens a bank account with a bank he can't pronounce and tells Anya that he wants to learn Russian. He needs to find a job to last a lifetime here, right? He places the box of note in a kitchen cupboard and locks it and doesn't even look at it once it's there.

"I admire your determination." Anya says, and Quan pretends not to hear the unsaid 'How long will you last?' in her voice. But he can't help but think it's rather unkind of her to open his wound like that, which he himself finds surprising, because Anya has always been kind to him no matter how she and Amelia dislike each other or how people look at that girl and see a snow woman - cold and beautiful and deadly.

"Thank you for your help." He says instead.

"You're welcome. What do you want to do now? Go sightseeing?"

Such an ideal choice for directionless people, he thinks when he walks and walks and walks and he doesn't think about the box in his cupboard and he combs every inch of the city until it's more familiar to him than ever his homeland. He revels in the beauty of it, the city built on blood and bones, and he learns its pathway and its history and its mystery and he comes to love it and understand why Anya absolutely adores it. It is an impossible city, he often thinks, stands in his apartment and looks for jobs with the city laid out in front of him, a city that stands as the victor, as the testament to the triumph of people will over nature, over rationality and practicality and sentimentality. A city to resent for the lives it costs to build, a city to be so inspired by that you feel you could touch the sky if you wanted badly.

And here, in the wide and endless roads running along the tall and beautiful buildings, Quan feels like maybe Amelia's grip on him is a little less tight than ever before.

xxx

 _I can see why you love it here, though it doesn't change my opinion. This city is kind of beautiful, in a brutal sort of way, just like Braginskaya. It makes me sad. But if there's something that makes it not so different from Washington DC and Berlin and Beijing, it's the feeling when I set my foot on the ground and wonder how many skeletons lie underground. It's almost of a metaphor, I suppose. Our whole lives are built on skeletons and dead bodies and we are burdened with glory and guilt of the past. Is that why you love it here? Because it utterly and completely represent humanity?_

xxx

The note is waiting for him on the kitchen table when he gets back from yet another walk, months after his arrival and still unable to settle. He reads it many times through without pause, so many times that he's lost count and then he puts it back down and stares at it longer than he's ever admitted, feeling so defeated and so lost and so pathetic.

It's somewhere between the clock chiming the hour and a car roaring in the street below that Quan is overwhelmed by a sudden realization. Lifting up the piece of paper to his nose, he inhales once, deeply. There is no trace of her scent on it, and yet, yet -

"No, Amelia." He speaks, breaking the silence in the apartment, staring at the paper as if he was addressing it, suddenly very aware of his surrounding. "I don't like it because it reminds me of humanity. I like it because it reminds me of you."

Amelia would definitely strangle him with her favorite baseball later, Quan thinks a bit fondly, for saying that about the city she dislikes. There is nothing but silence in response, but he knows and he's patient. There is no scent on the paper but her perfume is somewhere present in here, too strongly to be a lingering trace where she has left it. She is here, somewhere, so close that he can almost taste her on the tip of his tongue. His heart is pounding wildly, the veins on his body rising thick and dangerous, and he's clenching his fist so tightly that his knuckles turn white, his entire being so still as if petrified.

"I'm not built on blood and bones." The reply finally comes, so soft that he swears it could be mere imagination. But the she steps around the door frame of his bedroom and the world turns so still. They gaze at each other and Quan cannot do anything, cannot reach in any way. There is a dull roaring kind of voice echoing in his mind, like waterfall crashing, and there she stands wordlessly and watches him.

Her eyes are still very very blue.

"You -" He begins, but finds he cannot continue.

"Me." She nods, with a smallest hint of smiles, and suddenly he's aware of how much she must have changed, and he's missed it, the time when she grows from being a girl to being something almost like a woman, and Quan watches her, kind of in daze when she wraps her cardigan more tightly around herself, tucks an amber curl behind her ear, blinks twice and coughs once.

Still, he's ready to handle this new version of Amelia.

"Where have you been?" He finally gets out, still sits there like a statue, his expression disbelieving. "Where have you been, Amelia?"

"Here and there, close to you, usually, you just never see me." She winks, and sounds really happy with herself.

"I've been looking -" He tries to say, he tries to be angry, and she cuts him off with a quick brittle laugh and a shake of her head, short curls bouncing.

"Nobody's been looking. So, why does St Petersburg remind you of me?"

He's somewhat taken back by the sudden change of topic - he was used to her habits, once, but that was a very long time ago and he has change too much, and she hasn't changed as much as he initially thought, since they last saw each other. It's a moment before he can get any words out, but he manages eventually.

"It's like you. A lot." He emphasizes when she lets out a disbelieving snort. "It's cold and beautiful and built on tragedy."

"Are you sure you're not talking about Braginskaya?" He gives her a look. "Okay, continue."

"St Petersburg... it has secrets and it tells lies and it defies everything you think you know. And people love it," There is defiance in his voice. "People love it and it doesn't care. It just goes on being beautiful and cold and wonderful and so tragic that it doesn't care about the people having died for it."

"I did not ask anyone to die for me." She replies, voice even and he finds a retort without having to think.

"Neither did St Petersburg."

Her eyes darken for few moments longer, she looks slim and dangerous in the doorway, and Quan is wondering maybe he should be readying himself for a baseball hidden in the cardigan when she relaxes and hints of laughter return to her eyes, a glint of humor at the corner of her mouth.

"That's why you're so special to me." She remarks, casually and conversationally. "I've been compared to a lot of things, but never a city. And if anyone ever did that, I think the answer would be Washington DC or New York or some cities in America, definitely not Russia." She's silent for a moment, and then she adds, in somewhat surprised tone. "And I kind of like it."

"What do you want now, Amelia?" He asks evenly, shifting in his chair (and realize how tense his muscles are). "I've been waiting for you for nearly six years. So what's now? Why have you come here?"

She holds his gaze for several moments and then surprises him by being the one that drops it first. She looks a little defeated as she crosses the room and pulls out a chair for herself, a little lost, a little lonely and a little sad and a lot lovely. Quan realizes with a hint of despair that he loves her as much as he has. More now, more than ever, when the brave girl reduces to this quietly vulnerably defiant.

And it leaves his senses reeling.

"I just... I just couldn't do it anymore." She murmurs, fingers pressing into a knot in the wood of his table. "I was walking by the Neva when a kid screamed at his sister and a guy tried to sell me chestnuts and I couldn't take it anymore, so I..."

"So you came here." Quan says quietly, staring at her intently, wondering what on earth she wants from him.

"So I came here." She agrees, glancing up to meet his gaze, blue eyes bloodshot and exhausted. "I came here and I was about to run into hiding again when you got home."

Quan doesn't really know what to say so he doesn't say anything at all. Silence falls upon them, uneasy and tense, and Quan finds himself lost in the veins of her wrist, in the shadows of her hair cast on her shoulder, in the papery beauty of her face and her throat.

She's so thin.

"You're staring." Amelia points out, and Quan merely nods because he is and that is that. Silence stretches out between them again, only this time she's staring back and Quan can see himself, tall and brooding and black hair and amber eyes, reflected in her eyes.

Finally, she breaks the eye contact and looks away, and Quan watches as her gaze travels around his apartment slowly and carefully, as if to remember every little detail, and finally stops at the locked kitchen cupboard and the photo of his family on it.

He has the feeling that she knows what he keeps there.

"How are your siblings?"

"Doing well, I suppose. Chun Yan phones me every week, Qiu Min and Zhi Yang still sleeping in one room despite his protest and Xia Yue is never lost at cards, and Sakura hasn't come back."

"I've missed them." She says. "And you're wrong, I beat Xia Yue once in -"

"I've missed you." He cuts in, because it's about time for him to get it out. "I've missed you so much that sometimes I thought I was going mad about it."

Her gaze flicks back to his. A moment of silence and - "I've missed you so much that I know I've gone mad."

It's hard not to smile at this.

"So," He begins, "What now?"

Amelia doesn't reply for a while, just traces the swirls in the knot, head lower and brow furrowed as she ponders the question. Quan waits patiently, just like the way he's been waiting for her for nearly six years, and the sun starts to fall asleep as they sit quietly and Amelia thinks.

"We can try." She suggests finally, when he's almost convinced that she's going to never open her mouth again. "I guess, we could try... just being. You know, we can live here and keep living and sees what happens."

There's no point stopping nature running its course.

Quan looks at her intently, and Amelia goes on staring at the table. He cannot, however, think of a better solution for this, so he nods. "Alright."

xxx

You look good when you sleep. I woke up and I thought I'd died in my sleep and woken up next to a god - because you're much more than an angel. Don't worry, darling, I'll be back soon. I just need to go for a walk to collect my thoughts.

xxx

When he finds the note on the pillow, his heart fails him a little, and a thought of 'I should have known' comes across his mind, but then he reads it again and again, he finds himself breathing deeply in a sort of desperate relief. It's the shortest note she's written to him, but it's definitely his favorite. That girl has always been better at a pen than voicing her thoughts, and Quan thinks in another life, she could become a wonderful writer.

True to her word, she's back to the apartment before long, blue eyes sparkling and cheeks red from the cold outside. Quan shakes his head at her idiocy ('Bravery', she insists, but whatever) for defying the Russian winter without enough layers and he makes her breakfast and the ease of it nearly knocks him out. It just makes sense, to be with her like this. To have her so close, to breathe her in with every second, to hear her laugh and listen to the crazy ramblings of her mind and count the stars in her eyes when she smile.

(it's like the old time, when Amelia says she's dreamer and he's too real for her - but Amelia is born to bend the rules.)

"Did you regret it?" He says one evening when they are curled up on the couch, her head on his shoulder and she's playing with her nails. "Did you regret running away? You didn't even say goodbye to Alice."

Amelia's face sets, her hands fist in the hem of her dress, and Quan can't help but think he's never seen a Russian winter so cold and so lovely in his entire life.

"What am I supposed to say?" She demands in a low tone, lips set into a thin line - a habit that she's learnt from Alice and denies it over and over. "Was I supposed to hug her and kiss her on the cheek and say that I was sorry that Madeline was turned into a vegetable and worse than death but I had to leave because I couldn't bear it? What do you think she should have said?"

"She deserved a goodbye." Quan presses. "She would have forgiven you."

"So what? You think I don't know that? But it would make me feel worse, because Maddie is my twin sister and I couldn't protect her and Alice and Marianne loves me too much -" She snaps, throwing back the blanket and rising on her feet in one swift movement.

"Amelia, you know I don't mean that. You came to say goodbye to me and I forgave you."

"Because even if I torn down the moon you'd still forgive me."

He clambers to his feet too, towering over her, and he's staring to feel truly angry for the first time in a very long time since she stood before him in that stupidly tiny brown jacket the day the doctor said Madeline might not be able to wake up again and told him that she was leaving.

"You're a coward, Amelia F Jones." He tells her now, advancing on her slowly. "You're selfish and cruel and never that brave."

"Then why do you love me, Quan?" She demands, eyes sparkling with which he can recognize as tears. "Why do you love me?"

Quan doesn't have an answer for that the way he usually doesn't have answers for her questions, and so he just stands and glares down at her and she stands and glares up at him and somewhere in the mist of fury and pain and hopelessness and brokenness, Quan finds himself gathering her to him and kissing her the way he has been needing it for all those years. She's half crying and half smiling and half joking ("I thought you weren't the one to take the initiative") when she kisses him back, thin arms winding around his neck and they don't pause for breath until he accidentally rips her dress from her shoulder before becoming so still, eyes wide and mouth open in surprise.

Amelia bursts out laughing.

"What? You've just realized you were too eager?"

"No, it's not like that..." He takes a deep breath against her neck. "When did you get this?" She blinks, before glancing at the tattoo sitting dark against the skin on her side and grins.

"Can you guess?" She asks as he traces fingers across it and scatters kisses and his hairline. Quan pulls back to read the phrase branded there and she shivers as he presses his fingertips against each word in turn, her skin flushed with goosebumps as he bends to kiss the ink.

"You've read my books, I suppose."

"What else am I supposed to do to kill time? Play baseball in winter?"

"But I thought you weren't into Russian literature."

"I appreciate culture of all countries."

"So, why Nabokov?"

"He tells me the truth about world." She whispers as she fists her finger in his hair.

"The way St Petersburg tells you truth about humanity?" Quan asks softly, and he looks up to find Amelia looking down at him, with the most terrible type of sadness in her eyes.

"Yes. They tell me the truth. And truth isn't pretty. It makes me ache, darling. It makes me ache."

"It shouldn't have to." He replies gently, his fingers pressing to her side and he rises on his feet. "Truth doesn't always cause pain, Mia."

"Doesn't it." She asks in unusually tiny voice. "Doesn't it?"

He doesn't know how to reassure her now, doesn't know how to prove her it can be better than this - so he just kisses her again and later that night he reads her all four cantos of Pale Fire and she joins him on the line she's imprinted on her ribs, muttering 'For we are most artistically caged', and she repeats it over and over again, in her clear strong voice, and later yet when she is curled up asleep next to him, Quan finds himself staring at the ceiling, his fingers still running over her new tattoo and wonders what exactly she was thinking when she chose that line to be scrawled against her skin forever.

She wakes up a short time later with a scream and Quan finds himself holding her as she weeps into his chest, not even entirely sure what's happening. After half an hour of comforting and assuring her that it's just a nightmare, she finally admits that she sees it every night, the moment her twin sister threw herself forward to push Amelia back and disappeared over the cliff with the ground that Amelia had been clicking her heels on two seconds previously.

"It's not your fault, Mia." Quan finds himself saying over and over again, shaking her harder than he intended to. "You didn't know the ground was weak, you didn't know anything."

"I called her." Amelia sobs, and she looks wilder than he's ever seen. "I called her to meet me and didn't listen to her and I stomp my feet - I should have been me, Quan. I deserved to go over with it, but she saved me, she pushed me back."

(She hates Madeline, most days, for her bravery. She's braver than Amelia can ever be, and Amelia hates her for it, because when Maddie is strong, she will no longer need Amelia.)

It takes Quan two hours to calm Amelia down, but he doesn't tell her to forget it even though she wakes up screaming every night and she's destroying herself for this. But he's kind of selfish, he thinks. If Amelia forgot everything, she would start over , and he'd lose her again, just like he's lost her many times before.

"St Petersburg forgot too." She tells him. "The people who love it haven't forgotten but the city has. It's kind of serene, don't you think?"

"Then don't forget." He says. Amelia is the epitome of serenity now, that is for sure, lying so still and so quiet in his arms.

"You're not less selfish than me." She breathes, her smile is wider than he's ever seen her smile as she wraps her arms around his chest, her eyes soft and sleepy. "How long will you love me, darling?"

Quan smiles down at her and presses a kiss to her forehead and says. "I don't know. Until I stop."

"Then don't ever." She whispers, raising her head to kiss him and Quan decides that he might even love her more than he loves St Petersburg.

* * *

 **author note:** I'm not really happy with the way I wrote the ending.

Please don't fav without review! Or I will set Romano's mafia on you.

Thank you for reading.


End file.
